Re: [WinMac] Re: Office version terminology question

John Nurick(j.nurick[at]dial.pipex.com)
Wed, 02 Sep 1998 06:01:52 +0100

At 08:52 01/09/98 -0000, Jeff Thorstad wrote:

>This is incorrect, slightly. There's some confusion between the older
>versions of Office in this answer. Office 95 was version 7 of all the
>programs. Office 4.x was version 5 of Excel and 6 of Word and 4 (I think)
>of PowerPoint. Also, Office 4.x was Win 3.1 programs, but Office 95 was
>Win95 programs. Office 95 did not really give much of an upgrade to
>Office 4.x, other than updating it a little for Win95. There were almost
>zero new functions in this upgrade. This is when Office started being
>32bit.

Not quite sure about this. I'm pretty sure there were 32-bit versions of
Word 6 and Excel 5 (for Windows NT 3.x) though I don't remember seeing a
32-bit Office 4.x. Agreed, there were few new functions in Office 95, but
things like spell-checking on the fly are very nice, and Word 7.0a is a lot
more stable than 6.0x.

...

>>I like how you can
>>rename or delete files from the OpenFile dialog box of Win95 compliant apps.
>>Office 95 apps would not let you do this. You would have to do file
>>maintenance from the Explorer. Also, with Office 95 you would have to use
>>file names of the 8.3 format. In Office97 you have 256.3 that you can use.

>This was the problem with Office 95. It didn't upgrade enough to make it
>a real 32bit set of programs. The file naming WAS still 8.3, along with
>other mistakes. One of the stupidest things Microsoft ever did was
>"kinda" upgrading Office.

There must be something wrong with your computers. Every installation of
Office 95 I've seen uses long file names and lets you do file management in
the Open dialog. Could it be that these systems were enforcing 8.3 to
maintain compatibility with NT 3.x or Novell servers, or even (gasp!)
versions of MacOS that hadn't heard about long WinDOS names?

As for stupid: the high degree of compatibility between Office 4.x and
Office 95 did a lot to ease the transition from Win3.x to 32-bit systems. I
would not have enjoyed supporting users through Win95 teething troubles and
Office 97 ones *simultaneously*!

John

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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b2 on Tue Sep 01 1998 - 22:06:40 PDT